


A Report in Retrospect: An Examination of the Organization Founders' Redemption

by violethowler



Series: Kingdom Hearts III Meta [3]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Character Analysis, Essay, Light mention of unethical scientific experiments, Meta, Nonfiction, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Spoilers - Kingdom Hearts III, nothing graphic just discussing how involved certain characters were with them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 08:23:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17721629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violethowler/pseuds/violethowler
Summary: Though not often acknowledged, the reports hidden throughout the Kingdom Hearts games exhibit frequent use of the Unreliable Narrator trope.Spoilers for Kingdom Hearts III





	A Report in Retrospect: An Examination of the Organization Founders' Redemption

**Author's Note:**

> So I love the way the four re-completed apprentices of Ansem the Wise were handled in Kingdom Hearts III (Dilan and Aeleus' lack of lines notwithstanding) in regards to their redemption, and I've been thinking a lot about how the sympathetic portrayal of Ansem's original apprentices works even when taking into account the Secret Ansem Reports in KH2. 
> 
> EDIT: Changed the last paragraph (and ended up splitting it into two) to have a better conclusion. In retrospect I got off track at the end the first time around.

It’s been more than a few hours shy of a week since I finished my first playthrough of Kingdom Hearts III, and some of my favorite characters in the whole game were Even, Ienzo, and Ansem. I loved the way the game handled the former two’s efforts to atone for the things they’d done as part of Organization XIII. But the reunion scene between Ansem and Ienzo got me thinking about is how our perception of the Organization’s founding members and their human selves has evolved over the years. Looking back, our only source of info on their original selves in the early years of the franchise was DiZ, who Kingdom Hearts II also established as bitter, vindictive, and single-mindedly focused on revenge. Clearly not an unbiased narrator. But I think it was only in recent years that we truly realized just how biased our perspective against them really was.

We first learn about the story of the six apprentices’ descent into Darkness and their role in the creation of Organization XIII through the Secret Ansem Reports collected throughout Kingdom Hearts II. In these reports, DiZ talks at length about how his apprentices betrayed him, giving audiences the impression that his banishment and the inhumane experiments that his apprentices had been conducting in his name were a group undertaking, and that all six continued these experiments fully cognizant of their betrayal. Their actions as Nobodies in Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II support this narrative, and none of their appearances in 358/2 Days drastically change our perceptions of the characters.

Birth by Sleep is where the narrative shifts. We’re given a window into their lives prior to the founding of Organization XIII, and it doesn’t match up with what the previous games had established about their backstories. We knew Zexion was the youngest of the six, but it was a shock to learn that Ienzo was a _child_ when he lost his heart, that he’d been DiZ’s adopted son in all but name. Xaldin and Lexaeus had been royal guards dedicated to the defense of their city. Vexen had been Ienzo’s reluctant chaperone who still cared about the boy deep down.

Their noble portrayal in BBS stands in direct contrast with DiZ’s recollection of his six apprentices as malicious backstabbers. If the last two apprentices had been portrayed as sympathetically in that game as the other four, their origin story would have been a tragic one, where all six were corrupted as their desire to see their research through to the end drove a wedge between them and their mentor. But the thing that made our knowledge of what transpired during the year between the end of Birth by Sleep and the founding of Organization XIII murkier stems from the actions of one person: Braig.  

Of the five apprentices whose names aren’t Xehanort, Braig is the only one of the Organization’s founding members who is not portrayed sympathetically at all during the entirety of Birth by Sleep. We see him first as a greedy, ambitious opportunist who wanted a Keyblade for himself and eagerly helped Xehanort in the hopes of receiving one. (And this is without getting into the reveal of his true agenda at the end of Kingdom Hearts III) So, when the secret ending shows Braig beginning to put ideas in the amnesiac Xehanort’s head, it muddies the waters and raises a whole host of questions: How involved were the other four in the infamous experiments? Was Ienzo spurring Ansem into building the lab his own idea, or had Xehanort coached him knowing that the king of Radiant Garden would never refuse his surrogate son? Did the other four have qualms about the immorality of their experiments that Xehanort and Braig convinced them to ignore? And was DiZ’s banishment really the work of all six, or had Xehanort and Braig acted alone, leaving DiZ to bitterly assume that the other four had supported the coup?

So, when Ienzo revealed that he’d been told his adopted father had abandoned him, the pieces began to fit into place. If Ienzo had been kept in the dark about DiZ’s fate, then the odds were good that the king’s banishment had been the work of Xehanort and Braig alone. Given Even’s protectiveness of him in BBS, and the reveal that he was kept out of the loop regarding Ansem’s fate, the evidence indicates that Ienzo wasn’t directly involved in any of the horrific experiments, while Even, given his guilt and atonement in Kingdom Hearts III, had an active hand in them. Dilan and Aeleus don’t speak at all in Kingdom Hearts III (likely because they couldn’t get their previous voice actors back to record), but judging from their portrayal in Birth by Sleep and the fact that they don’t seen to feel like they need to go to similar lengths as Even to atone, it’s likely that their level of involvement in the experiments was closer to Ienzo’s than to Evens. Which makes sense when we learn that half of the apprentices were guards, not full-time researchers.

So when Even, Ienzo, and Ansem collaborate to engineer Roxas and Xions' resurrection, it works. And it's because of the fact that the Reports that are collected in each game are not always intended to be taken as hard, immutable facts. The reports serve as journals that reflect a character's thoughts and emotions about what they're doing based on the information they have available to them. Their value to the audience is in how each author's reminiscing adds new context to their on-screen actions. And because DiZ was already established as an angry, bitter man hardened by Xehanort's betrayal in Kingdom Hearts 2, it's entirely within his established character for him to remember his six pupils and the events surrounding his banishment in a worse light.

And given how his quest for revenge against Organization XIII was primarily directed at Xemnas specifically, it suggests that despite projecting his anger onto all six, Xehanort was the one he was truly angry with. And unlike the first time he's trapped on the Dark Margin, where he escaped by focusing solely on his anger and desire for revenge, he's had at least a year to contemplate and reflect on his life. It's easier, then, for him to reconcile with the ones still in Radiant Garden when he didn't truly hate them to begin with. Ever since Birth by Sleep, when Ansem's apprentices were depicted as ordinary people instead of the treacherous mad scientists their embittered mentor remembered them as, the audience's perception of the apprentices as characters has been slowly shifting, culminating in their quest for atonement in Kingdom Hearts III. 


End file.
